Sorting and Categorising Applications (updated)
As a short response to Bill Humphries' call for said apps, here's a brief list of OS X apps:
Argh, there were a couple of apps that I've come across in the past that I forgot from the original list, pretty obviously marked with 'UPDATE:'
The apps I've outlined tend to fall into two camps, those that help you manage external files, and those that manage text, and are basically editing environments. DEVONthink strikes me as the winner in the former category (and it also supports text and Rich Text within the app), and Tinderbox is undoubtedly the most sophisticated (or flexible), in the latter category.
TidBITS has a bunch of articles and reviews of various apps along these lines, and is really worth a read. Matt Neuburg is a kindred spirit in the constant search for 'the perfect' snippet/info manager, come 'virtual memory', and has written many articles on the topic, see Conquer Your Text, for a couple of good examples.
- DEVONthink - 'Knowledge base and information manager', handles text, PDF etc., exhibits some categorisation etc. The most appropriate to what I think Bill's after... See an excellent article in TidBITS: DEVONthink Thinks, So You Don't Have To.
- UPDATE: Tinderbox - the mighty Tinderbox, how could I not include this? Depending on your needs Tinderbox could be heaven, or complete overkill. It's certainly a powerful tool, that allows a good bit of 'programmed intelligence'. I've been interested in it for some time, but never taken the plunge in terms of the learning curve, nor the expense! “Tinderbox is a personal content management assistant. It stores your notes, ideas, and plans. It can help you organise and understand them. And Tinderbox helps you share ideas through Web journals and web logs.” It's very powerful, but isn't really oriented toward managing files, but rather as an editing environment of it's own. See TiBITS: Light Your Fire with Tinderbox
- UPDATE: Hmmm StickyBrain, whatever happened to you... TidBITS... did this morph into Sh-out My Brain? I recall that app used to have a different name...
- UPDATE: ideaSpiral - thanks to a collegue for reminding me about ideaSpiral, basically a 'snippet manager', rather than document manager (similar to DEVONnote), billed as (quite obviously!) an idea manager.
- DEVONnote - mainly text, they call it 'DEVONthink's little brother'
- Sh-Out ! My Brain - another 'idea manager', Rich Text outliner “Sh-Out! My Brain is an idea management tool which can manage your ideas into an outline-styled (text) database”
- UPDATE: Boswell - billed as a research tool that archives, organises, manipulates, and searches: text, e-mail, web clippings, contact info. See TidBITS: Boswell: A Text Motel.
- UPDATE: MTLibrarian - index and search text, HTML and PDF, and create groups of documents which are keyword searchable. Should definitely have included this to begin with, although it's not been updated for a while, and seems to have a few cosmetic issues under Panther.
- UPDATE: iOrganizeX - again, similar to DEVONnote/ideaSpiral, billed as a notepad/snippet manager.
- UPDATE: Idea Knot - pretty early version (0.4), and not updated since July 2003 - “With it you write documents that contain ideas written quickly at the instant inspiration hits you. You then organise these ideas together into relevant groups.”
- Smart Folders - Purports to implement iTunes-like Smart Playlist (or basically Copland's promised live search feature) in the Finder, it actually just creates aliases, and the criteria available isn't that flexible.
- LiveSearch - a search tool, but somewhat relevant, in combination with Finder-level organisation (depends how organised your file structure is!)
- Curio - Aid for creative design teams, not really what Bill's looking for, but talking to the developers, they seem to be moving in the direction, of managing files, indexing text etc. Appeals to the designer in me!
- OmniOutliner - not what Bill's looking for, but quite interesting in the set of capabilities, for an outliner, such as XML support (via OPML). Very good as a general list manager, generally what a lot of Windows people use Excel for!
- Entourage X Project Centre - the upcoming Office X 2004 includes the project centre... but I'm straying too much into project management uses (the stuff I want to do at the moment; manage the sets of files, apps, contacts etc, for a given project.)
UPDATE: Check out the new Flash tour
- HandyList - very basic, but lets you manage apps and files (well paths), URLs, emails etc.
- Bruce Horn's upcoming iFile might be relevant too... but that remains to be seen. See Adam Engst's recent interview
- Then there's also NoteTaker and Circus Ponies' NoteBook, but I'm not really into the whole faux physical notebook thang, although InkBook's kind of interesting, in that they purport to allow you to take notes in your own handwritting, via OS X InkWell (obviously requires a tablet of some kind), but the performance hasn't been too great, for me.
- OK, so it's a short list!
UPDATE: check out the comments, 'Anon' points out that Xcode can be used to manage text files... interesting.
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